Well-known game developer David Braben is a little bit fed up with the state of computer science education these days, which seems to have shifted away from learning programming to some sort of computer-oriented "life skills" class. As the father of eleven and nine year-old boys, I can attest that so far, despite a massive investment on the part of their school in computer equipment, their computer education has consisted mostly of "play this math game" and "don't be victimized by cyber-perverts." Braben's idea to stem this tide: a very, very cheap computer that students can learn to program on.

I disagree. Programming is a general topic, at least a part of it. Learning how to program when I was younger taught me the basic scientific workflow of our days (start from a problem, analyze it, slice it in tiny bits, work on those bits, put the pieces together), which in turn was very useful knowledge later. Computer are stupid machines, programming them involves putting vague, abstract thoughts in a precise form. And that knowledge is very useful.

I agree. Programming itself might not be such a useful talent for many people, but learning how to handle complex problems and the workflow of picking a problem apart and putting it back together is always useful, no matter what field you're going to take in the future. And for learning that programming is a very logical choice, there's not many other fields where one can be taught such as easily.

I would've loved it if programming had been part of my education. I went to a rather prestigious high school, but we had none of that. I always wondered why nobody ever developed an education programme for teaching kids programming, starting in primary school, and carrying over into high school. I mean, I started learning English when I was 8 - basic courses programming could tie math in with language.

God knows how many excellent programmers never get to know they're excellent programmers simply because our education system doesn't cater to them.

Back when I was still in school we had some rudimentary programming lessons in C and HTML, but... well, the teacher was absolutely horrible. He didn't know anything about the topic himself, he was just following textbook, and if something didn't work the way it should he didn't know what to do, nor did he accept any other solutions to things than what were in the book. In the end no one really learned anything and all the students were just plain confused and frustrated, and the courses were dropped.

It's kind of sad. There were a few people who were genuinely interested, but their interest was totally killed by that teacher.

Oh well, my point is that even though being taught programming would be good for most people having a horrible teacher is worse than getting no education at all.

I would've loved it if programming had been part of my education. I went to a rather prestigious high school, but we had none of that.

I visited a school outside München as part of an exchange programme at age 12. For people my age they had a programming lesson teaching C. My school back in the UK didnt have computers then! The most I'd done *in my spare time at home* had been BASIC and a small amount of Pascal. Anyhow, two years later they introduced an IT lesson that included doing spreadsheets and rudimentary typesetting on PCWs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_PCW). They were out of date before they introduced them.
*sigh*